Helen M. Gougar

Mrs. Gougar, speaker, writer, and reform advocate was born in Litchfield, Michigan, July 18, 1843.  Educated in the free schools of her native town, at twelve years of age she entered Hillsdale College, from which she graduated in 1860.
     Helen M. Gougar began early in life to be a reform agitator, she has distinguished herself in the arenas of politics, literature, and oratory.  She was for many years a contributor to the Chicago Inter Ocean, one of her most notable literary efforts being a series of articles on “Home Rule in Ireland.”  She has traveled extensively, and her sketches of life in foreign lands have been published in the great daily papers all over the country.  She has written for The Arena and is also the author of several books – “Two Little Paupers,” “The traffic in Poison,” and “Suffrage in the United States.”  Mrs. Gougar is also a speaker of convincing power.  She has addressed special committees in Congress, and the legislatures of Indiana, Illinois, Nebraska, Iowa, New York, Wisconsin, and Kansas.  She is the author of the law granting municipal suffrage to women in Kansas, and has been president of the Indiana Woman’s Suffrage Association for fifteen years, besides being an officer of the State W.C.T.U.  Her alma mater, Hillsdale College, recently made her a member of its board of trustees, she is being the first woman to be thus honored by that institution.  She is a member of the bar, admitted to practice in all the courts of Indiana.
     Mrs. Gougar was formerly an ardent Republican, and a speaker and writer in support of that party, until the campaign of 1888, when she came out for the Prohibition Party.  She has been a staunch and valuable supporter of that party ever since and is now a member of its national executive committee, being the only woman ever elected to such a position in a national political organization.  She lives at Lafayette, Indiana, with her husband, who is a successful lawyer of wealth and refinement.

— Data from An Album of Representative Prohibitionists (1895)

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